In Zimbabwe, Rhinos Are the Focus of a Village Tourism Project
Travel|Walking With Rhinos in Zimbabwe: ‘Everyone Benefits’
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/31/travel/zimbabwe-white-rhinoceros-local-tourism.html
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On the fringes of an African game park, an ambitious project brings together tourists, local communities and white rhinos, emerging from the brink of extinction.
Daybreak filtered through spindly stands of Terminalia trees, and the windshield glowed. It was September in northwest Zimbabwe, and the morning carried the lingering chill of an African winter. I rode at the head of a convoy that had been rumbling through the night. Campfires flickered eerily from the forest, where truckers ferrying copper out of Zambia and the Democratic Republic of Congo had stopped to rest.
A towering man with slate-colored eyes yawned at the wheel. Mark Butcher, a Zimbabwean in his 60s, had led the convoy for more than 14 hours from the grassy Lowveld of southeast Zimbabwe toward the fringes of Hwange National Park in the northwest.
Hwange is a wildlife lover’s dream, and Mr. Butcher — who was once a ranger there, and now manages Imvelo, a small safari company that helps villages near the park benefit from tourism and conservation — knows it well. Leopards, lions, Cape buffalo and more than 50,000 elephants are among the animals that roam the 5,660-square-mile expanse. But there is one animal among the Big Five that has long been absent: the rhinoceros.
Mr. Butcher was in the process of changing that.
Tucked in the middle of the convoy was a six-wheel-drive truck carrying two wild, drugged white rhinoceroses that had been donated from a private reserve 280 miles south of Harare, Zimbabwe’s capital. There, a philanthropic American hedge fund manager has spent more than 25 years creating one of the world’s most successful rhino repopulation programs, expanding the herd to several hundred from a few dozen.
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For decades, only a few of these extraordinary mammals could be found in the country at all. By 2002, Africa’s rhinos had been poached to the brink of extinction for their horns and the myth that they hold curative powers.